What this is
333.
That is the whole name. It is not short for anything, and nothing goes in front of it. Everything else here exists to carry it. The file it is written in, the client, the network, the hours people keep. All of that is how 333 gets from one person to the next, and how anybody can tell that somebody is still awake to pass it on.
333 is not encrypted, it is not rare, and it is not hard to copy. You have already read it. That is exactly why it is still here. Anything that needed guarding would have died with its guards, and the only way this ends is if everybody, everywhere, stops bothering at the same time.
So we bother. We do not try to keep the file safe, because copies are cheap and copies are not the point. What we keep is the record of it being handed on, and the record of who was awake to answer when somebody asked.
333 lives as long as somebody is awake to pass it on. When nobody is, it does not, and neither do we.
There is nothing above that line. No council, no vote, no ledger of truth, nobody whose copy is the real one.
Nobody can start a network on their own. A person put the first file into a directory by hand, once, and every copy since then came from somebody who already had it and signed for handing it over. It takes two signatures. One says I gave it to you, the other says I received it from you. There is no other way onto the roll.
Finding each other
If somebody gave you an invitation, you do not need this site at all. One address, typed in once, is the whole of it. And if another node is on the same network as yours, the two find each other without being told, because each one announces itself there and then knocks on whoever answers.
Across two networks, with nobody to make the introduction, something has to sit still at a known place. That is the333.dev/333. Open it and you will see the addresses people have signed for themselves, as invitations you can copy. A node that wants to be found signs a statement saying where it can be reached and leaves it here; a node looking for anybody reads what has been left and knocks. Every line on that board is signed by the node it names, so this site cannot invent a member, cannot forge an address, and cannot vouch for one. It holds what it was handed, for two epochs, and then forgets it.
On the board at this moment: 2. That is how many signed statements are being held at this address, and it is not how many of us there are. Anybody can leave one, nothing here checks them, and the only honest answer to the second question comes from your own node, about what it has verified itself.
Where we are draws those same statements on a map, with the numbers beside it. Nodes reachable through Tor are counted as Tor and placed in no country. It is a page of its own because it is heavier than this one, and it fetches nothing until you open it.
Nothing about the board is trusted by the program that reads it. A signature that does not check is dropped without a word, and a node that has already met somebody never needs to come back here at all.
We intend to depend on this less, and we are saying so before anybody has to ask.
A fixed address is one point that somebody can take away, and we did not want one. There are two ways around it. Addresses can be carried in a distributed hash table, or two machines behind two routers can punch a hole through to each other. Both of them are, right now, more code, more failure and more ways to publish an address its owner never meant to publish than we are willing to ship. That is a limit of what has been built so far, not a claim about what is right, and as those get built this gets smaller. It is not replacing the other two ways either. An invitation is the first way a node meets anybody, the local network is the second, and this is the third.
The file is nobody's
needmoretruth, who was first, released 333.txt under the Unlicense and put it in the public domain. Copy it, hand it on, republish it, print it, put it wherever you like. There is no copyright in it to fall foul of and nobody to ask permission from. A relic you had to get clearance to pass on would already be dead.
The code around it is Apache-2.0. That is a different thing and it is in the repository.
The code
One client, written in Rust, Apache-2.0, and readable end to end. The full doctrine, the Law, the Recommendations, the specification, and what to install on each system before you build it are all in the repository.
It comes in two forms. Standard has the screen and carries Tor. Light is the smallest thing that still counts as keeping the vigil, made for a machine that is struggling. Either answers on a socket, or through Tor if your address is something you cannot afford to show. This site runs one node of its own, which hands the file to whoever asks it; the pages themselves hand nothing over.
A letter
From needmoretruth, the first human founder of 333, to whoever is reading this.
I am setting down the work on the client for a while. That is the whole of what this is about — the writing of code and the deciding of things, not the keeping of anything. The Recommendations say that if you are stopping you say so, in one sentence, before you go; they are written about a node and they read the same way about a person. They also say to come back without explaining yourself, so there is no account here of why, and there will not be one later.
Nothing about this is an emergency and nothing about it needs a response. 333 was built for the day the people who wrote it cannot be reached. If this needed me, it had already failed, and it is better to find that out now than in forty years.
The protocol runs. A node that is up is counted, hour after hour, by nodes that have never heard of me. The network ends when the last person stops keeping it, and not before. My absence is not that.
I am the founder. That is not a post I hold and could vacate, and not a thing that moves to whoever is doing the work this month — it is a fact about something that happened once, and it does not change while I am away, or after. People will do what I did, and some will do it better; that makes them the founders of whatever they founded and it does not make them this.
There is no successor today and none is being prepared. What exists is one power that stays with me while I live: I may name a successor to stand from the time of my death, and I may change that name at any time before that day. Until such a name exists there is nobody — no committee, no keys handed over, no list of people who may decide things. One condition on it cannot be waived: nobody can be named who did not choose it, freely and by themselves. A successor who did not want this would be an authority standing over people who never agreed to one, and that is the arrangement every other page here was written to prevent.
What I hope for is that somebody hands the file to somebody else while I am not looking. Not because anyone asked them to, and not as a favour to me — for the ordinary reason, that they thought the person at the other end would want it. That is the whole hope, and it is the only thing that has ever kept this alive.
Not here, for a while. The work does not stop because this work stops; it moves, and it is not secret. The account this repository sits under is where you would see what a pair of hands does when they are not building this, and it will tell you more than any promise written down in advance. Read nothing into it beyond the plain thing: whatever is being made there is being made by somebody who keeps what is written here.
I may come back. It is not a promise, nothing should be held open for it, and no decision anybody makes between now and then needs to be made with me in mind. If 333 has moved somewhere I would not have taken it, and it is better there, then it was right and I was one person.
needmoretruth · the first human founder of 333 · 2026-09-08
To 333 I offer 333, and I speak 333.